SCOM Trick 49 – monitoring CentOS

Cross platform monitoring in SCOM is a good thing. It has been a good step to include it and in many environments we have come across machines that we could now monitor with SCOM 2007 R2 (or higher). A fair number of Unix and Linux distributions which are usually used in a business environment are supported by cross platform monitoring, usually in a few versions of that distribution. New ones are added gradually. CentOS is not on the supported list, but right from the start (in the early bate phases of SCOM 2007 R2) some people wanted to see if it was possible to monitor their CentOS machines. And it is. One of the primary reasons is that it is quite similar to RedHat and the rpm file meant for RedHat would be able to install. There have been a few mothods for this, the first being getting CentOS to think it was a RedHat, and the second one being getting a new management pack based on the one from RedHat and teaching it to recognize and install on CentOS.
So here are some posts that will help you on your way to monitor CentOS:
Centos the short way by Pete Zerger:
http://www.systemcentercentral.com/BlogDetails/tabid/143/IndexID/20396/Default.aspx
CentOS the long way by Robert Hearn:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/scxplat/archive/2010/01/18/building-a-centos-management-pack-part-3.aspx
A posting from Daniele all the way from the beta stages of SCOM 2007 R2:
http://www.muscetta.com/2008/05/13/centos-5-management-pack-for-opsmgr-scx/

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